My question is... If I configure these policy settings will the settings also apply to my German clients?? Or must I import the german clients also. If I import the adm files from the german client how do I seperate them so the english policies are set to the english machines and the german to the german machines.

Once this is working I want to apply SP2 to my clients using SUS with th policies defines in Group policy.

First have u tried setting a policy & tested to see if it works on your english & german clients. If not, try it. Also r your german clients running a 'german' version or an 'english version of windows. I have staff who r japanese, they used to have pc's running a japanese OS. I can't read japanese, so this was a nightmare to support. We bought new PC's with windows 2000 ( english OS ) & i made changes so that they see everything in japanese. This is a feature of Windows 2000 & XP. But because the OS is english any patches or policies work OK. Let me know

I wasn't aware of the language change options. Have you any further information as we will soon be supporting clients in portugese, polish and spanish!

I will be starting the testing on Monday. I intend to set up two client machines, one english and one german. I will copy the group policy settings from the english version (my native langauge) and see if they are transferred to the german machine. (Making sure they are in the same OU). If that fails I will have to set up seperate OU's, something I really didnt want to do..

Out of interest if I set the group policy settings using the xp adm files will the relevant options also be applied to windows 2000 machines or do I need to setup seperate OU's?

As you can tell I'm new to this and mY reason for this post was to try nd get some pointers before I jumped in blind. I will post my findings here incase they are of use to others.

Hi Gary,
I guess from your user name that you are based in Scotland. R your german clients based in Germany? & if so who supports there PC's locally. Because i believe you would have to re-build their PC's with an english based OS in order to be able to apply english 'patches' & configure for different languages. As to using XP adm files & will they apply to windows 2000 pc's, that u can also test. Use a third test PC with Windows 2000 as the OS. I will play aound with a system here in regards as to 'how to do it' in different languages. I have only had to deal with japanese here. I will let u know what i come up with,

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/MUIFaq.mspx. Check out this link. This explains the Multi-Language Interface. This is an add-on at a cost from Microsoft. This feature will allow your to change the english windows 'skin' into most languages. I had a copy of this for Windows 2000. I could change my windows 'skin' to german, french, spanish, japanese etc. Basically this product makes all the menus, dropdowns display in whatever language you want. It can be switch back & forth between languages. I ended up not using this for my japanese guys because they could read english. I just had to change the regional settings so they could input in Japanese or English.

Completed testing and basically it does not matter what language the client is. I updated the adm files to xp sp2 from an english installation and configured via group policy. (gpmc.msc)

Then logged onto the domain with a german xp sp1 client, a german windows 2000 sp4 client, an english xp sp2 client and a german xp sp2 client. Basically the clients just took the group policy objects that were relevant to themselves. Even though the group policy had settings for the firewall in sp2 these were not passed down to the windows 2000 or the xp sp1 clients.

It all worked wonderfully well!

(Actually from Lincolnshire, but company bought a company here in germany so I moved out here. As the company has english and german employee's we support each in their native language. I support all the german guys, but we have a few english guys who are based here so their machines are in english.)

Will be checking out the multi language option and investigate this further, but to be honest as the group policy bit works the need is reduced..